From Targets to Tools: the Complex Relationship between Critical Infrastructures and Hybrid Threats

The complexity of the interaction between critical infrastructures and hybrid threats emerges in the specialized literature through a diversity of perspectives and approaches. This study investigates how the two concepts intersect, highlighting hybrid manifestations that combine cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, kinetic operations, economic coercion, and the exploitation of legal grey zones in international law. At the same time, critical infrastructures are analyzed both as strategic targets and as instruments for the propagation of hybrid threats, being weaponized through the exploitation of their sectoral and inter-sectoral vulnerabilities, and thus generating cascading effects. Examples from the literature highlight not only the cyber and economic dimensions of such hybrid actions but also the difficulties of attribution and the multidimensional nature of the typology of the actors involved. The conclusions of the article emphasize the necessity of understanding hybrid threats and critical infrastructures as interconnected realities, whose protection and resilience require a systemic and coordinated approach, capable of responding to the complex challenges of contemporary security.